Potential Pitfalls For Local marketing
Some things, you just take for granted. Examples such as those above – and many more – enter our visual vocabulary and help us to navigate our everyday habits and set the repertoire of brand choice.
Visual recognition is a powerful top-level driver in brand association. Quite apart from the cumulative recall that embeds powerful ‘brand stories’ from our deeper association with brands and their advertising, research has shown that very often just a colour or shape can trigger positive associated values and messaging that we have been previously exposed to.
Just imagine that every Barclays Bank Manager was allowed to paint the fascia of the branch in a colour of their choice. Or that the managers of tube stations were allowed to draw their own maps to explain the complexities of the network. Or every Tesco store was allowed to design and print their own advertising and promotional material. And why shouldn’t they? They know their own locality and their own local
market, don’t they?
So imagine, If only for a second, that Coca Cola has decided to delegate marketing and advertising to its local bottling and canning businesses and distributors around the world. It sounds OK. It helps cut head office costs and anyway, everyone is a bit of a marketing guru at heart. So what’s the worst that could happen?
Well, it’s simple. Within months these well-meaning amateur marketeers will have started to destroy one of the most powerful brands in the world.
Brands are like people. We rely on them to be consistent. If you have a friend who behaves differently every time you meet them, you start to distrust them. Brands are exactly the same. Brand guardianship can never be successfully delegated away from a central marketing function to a local level. No matter how many brand guidelines are issued, an unacceptable level of design inconsistency and mixed messaging will inevitably creep in and corrupt the brand.
And that’s an expensive mistake to make. Brands take many years and a huge investment to become famous and to attach positive, differentiating and compelling messages to. As humans, we attach our own experiences and preferences to these brand images, colours, logos, premises, advertising, style, and even typefaces.
Absolute consistency of visual style, tone of voice, and positioning, character and attitude is vital to build strong and durable brands. A Sun journalist, writing in the style which is familiar and expected by his readers, would not be successful by transposing exactly the same copy to an article in The Times. It would feel unfamiliar and therefore not trusted.
So when head office is spending millions to create a valuable brand, does it make sense to have the image and investment corrupted by untrained staff at a local level? Usually not. Brand value is tangible, and can often be the most highly prized balance sheet asset.
Luckily, the process for ensuring consistency throughout every part of your marketing operations is easier than it used to be, particularly with e-marketing. Our LAW AMP platform, for example, can template precise formats that can be personalised to the ultimate degree by working seamlessly in tandem with CRM data to enable anyone, anywhere to produce email and mobile messaging that fully reflects the brand, its positioning and its core messages, whilst remaining fully under the control of central marketing departments.
Local staff can then focus on their full time jobs – running and maximising the customer experience for customers at every visit.
But don’t expect them to suddenly become marketing experts. The chances are they will not be able to fulfill their brief and it is not only the local branch or operation that will suffer. It will erode the value of your brand, at the expense of a degeneration of business for the whole operation.
LAW Creative is a registered partner of Copernica Marketing Software. Copernica is an international developer of powerful marketing software with over 3,500 users. If you would like to discuss how we can forge strategy, data, technology and creativity into a potent e-marketing plan on behalf of your business please contact brett.sammels@lawcreative.co.uk
